Factory reset iPhone 3G not recognised in iTunes 9,10 or 11!!!

My friend has just been given someone's old iPhone 3G and so I have been trying to set it up for her with her PC. I started out by resetting the iPhone to its factory settings by doing a hard reset from within the iPhone settings resulting in the phone displaying the "connect to iTunes" message. I installed the latest version of iTunes 11 from the apple site and connected the phone up. After a few seconds the iPhone tab pops up in the top right corner as you would expect, but when I click on it the page changes and says "iPhone" in big writing across the centre of the screen but the individual iPhone tabs are missing from the top of the screen and nothing else happens. I have tried restarting phone and iTunes multiple times as well as the PC and all have no effect. I've also noticed that on connecting the iPhone, no pop messages from the start bar occur which I'm surprised about- its as though the PC is not even seeing the phone (although the phone is receiving power down the USB cable).

I have tried installing iTunes 9 and 10 but these both experience exactly the same problem. I may be missing something really obvious here - I'm a decade long mac user and never usually touch PCs so I'm not up to speed on how the interface handles devices such as phones. I have been through many of the online forums and tried a few things but none of them are working. Something strange I have noticed - just before I have done reinstalls of iTunes I have gone into "add/remove programs" and have removed the apple mobile device driver, apple software update and another apple thing and when this has completed the start bar bar pops up with a camera hardware found message i.e it suddenly sees the phone after the apple components have been removed... Strange.

If anyone could give me some suggestions I'd be very grateful. The machine is a shuttle X PC running XP SP4 and spec is high enough for iTunes 11.

Cheers, Joey